


fluorescent

by keehling



Category: Original Work
Genre: Drug Use, Gen, Self-Harm, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-18
Updated: 2016-08-18
Packaged: 2018-08-09 15:04:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7806541
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/keehling/pseuds/keehling
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>a man finds himself running out of things to think about while in solitary confinement.</p>
            </blockquote>





	fluorescent

In a place like this, your mind just runs out of things to fucking think about. 

He’s tossed in this pristine and packaged 6-by-8 and the first thing on the brain (of all things, really? of all things) is fixes. The dope. Plopped on this three-inch thick styrofoam-y excuse for a mattress, he’s hunched over, legs wide, but soles of socks pressed together to create a diamond of space to fill - and he does. Fill it, that is. With an arm. Thumbing over track marks in the same absentminded, mechanical, methodical way multiple-choice bubbles are penciled in. Withdrawals are gonna be a bitch, he thinks as he studies irritated pink skin and conjures images up of those shitty, too-hard, too-dry erasers that do a hell of a lot more smearing than erasing. He wouldn’t really know, though. He didn’t ever erase a ton.

And they are a bitch, by the way. Guards don’t give a shit if you sweat through your clothing. Guards don’t give a shit when you’re hit with the shivers, bags underneath your eyes purple and carved six feet deep. His teeth grit hard enough that they might splinter like china. That’s what he thinks every time he clenches and unclenches his jaw, feeling teeth grind and imagining the dry, delicate tinkle of porcelain when you step on it. One of the best sounds, he swears, and cracks knuckles for the 34th time within the hour.

( At least, he thinks it’s an hour - Nah, scratch that. He doesn’t think shit about the time. Solitary’s got fuck all of a schedule, just when the meals come in and out. It’s only when his body betrays his consciousness and trembles with the exhaustion of insomnia - or withdrawals, maybe - that he has an ounce of a clue what goes on beyond concrete walls. )

Scales and vitals have never really been something categorized as important to him - sure, they take his blood pressure, weigh him, measure him up-and-down upon transfer into the prison, but none of that matters to him. Numbers only end up becoming the slightest interest when he notices limbs thinning, ribs emerging. Blame it on the withdrawals. Blame it on the lack of activity. Blame it on anything besides the fact that he’s not eating the soggy shit they’re pushing through the doggy door, more out of pride than depression.

He only eats when it becomes too boring to not.

Right, so he thinks about withdrawals. Thinks about time and the guards, with their eyes saran-wrapped in Stanford and lips pinched down at the corners like the humid pigtails of an adolescent girl, or a dying, drooping plant. Thinks about food. After that, it’s just…prison.

They don’t actually call it solitary, within the walls. Nah. After his third day, when he provoked the Italian mafioso-looking motherfucker with the missing front tooth and the leering gaze into a sucker punch to the gut, all the faces behind the cameras universally decided his type should be reserved to “segregation” or “restrictive housing.” Security Housing Unit. Intensive Management Unit. The Hole. 

‘Justice’ has always been a relative term to him, so right off the bat, it doesn’t matter whether he’s sleeping in a metal bunk with more sway and creak to it than an abandoned yacht, or if it’s that slab of styrofoam he’s mentioned earlier. Grass is always greener on the other side, eh? 'Least here he doesn’t have to listen to the snoring.

Just the screaming, and the whisper of fishing that never reaches him, whose cell stands at the end of the hall.

And as time goes on ('time,’ yeah, he knows its vague - but you already know how he feels about time) he learns to hate the guards less. Their position, and he’s sure anyone’d treat cellies like cattle. Just real smart cattle. Catching those little bits of paper is a chore, like waking up early to milk the cows. That’s how they handle him, anyways, when he’s fetched for his seven minute shower, half-an-hour outside time. ’Inmate, put your hands in front of you, palms out.’ And the two of them waltz in. Sometimes, they fill his cell with small talk to interrupt the stark contrast of the off-white walls with powder blue uniforms, but most of the time, it’s silence. 

Now that? That fucks with him, a little. Not the silence, so much, but the thinking about prison while he’s in prison. After that, he finds himself thinking about the walls, and the world. Back up far enough, and the world becomes a sphere (it doesn’t, it’s an oblate spheroid, but that doesn’t fuckin’ matter). Even all those Mt. Everest’s and the Mariana’s Trench’s become nothing at a great enough distance, smoothed out until practically spherical - but come close enough to anything, and you can spot a flaw. Like those little lines on bouncy balls, where you can tell where each half was cemented together.

His room is like that - the walls, specifically - like mentioned before. One week, when he refuses to put his palms out or stand up, and the whole lot (four or five) of meatbags had to come into his cell and hold him down, cuff him, tear it all apart in search of a weapon or contraband, he gets his showering and courtyard rights removed. Two uninterrupted weeks of confinement with only routine meals to keep him company makes his cell into his world, and he spends the time studying every inch of the wall, every imperfection. 

He thinks, and hear him out, that he can make out the color difference of paint around the metal cage that protects the single beam of fluorescent light bulb. A new addition, post glass-shatter. Post wrist-slit.

By the time they fetch him to shower, he’s sure he knows what corner of the room the last inmate’s soul died.


End file.
